From time to time I read articles bemoaning the supposed "fact" that concert audiences don't like modern music. This kind of sweeping generalization makes me want to tear out whatever hair I have left! The authors always focus on the hundreds of people who leave the hall when a modern work comes around. What about the thousands who show up? It's just the old story of the optimist and pessimist. I'd always rather look at the donut than the hole (metaphorically -- since I'm diabetic any actual looking at donuts is just trouble!). My rant for the day.
Perhaps the trick is that modern concert music has become so diverse in its range -- more so than any previous era -- that music lovers develop an appreciation for particular composers, while not enjoying the works of others so much. Take me as an example; I'm a lifelong fan of the music of Leoš Janáček, a Slovak composer who lived from 1854 to 1928. And yet I'm quite well aware that many people don't enjoy his music. But then, maybe they haven't sampled this particular piece. By the dates, it's obvious that his life and career overlapped those of the famous Czech composers Smetana and Dvořák, but don't look for similarities! All of Janáček's greatest works were composed during the last decade of his life (that is, of course, after World War One) and that includes the beautiful opera I'm writing about today: The Cunning Little Vixen.
I said "cartoons" in the headline, but it would actually be truer to refer to the source material as what is now called a "graphic novel" -- a detailed story told by means of a series of illustrated panels accompanied by text, where the words and pictures equally help to carry the story forward. The original was published as a newspaper serial. Janáček adapted his own libretto (in consultation with the original author), making an important change that turned the ending darker while still holding out hope for a cycle of renewal, death and new life. This is the theme in the work which speaks loudest and most deeply to me.
This story is a tale of nature in the forest. There are several human characters, including a teacher, a forester and his wife and so on. But the key characters are all animals and birds and insects, including the title character. In the first act the Forester is asleep when he's woken up by a frog jumping into his lap. He sees and catches the young Vixen and takes her home to confine her, but she manages to chew through the rope that holds her, attacks the rooster and the crested hen, kills the chickens and escapes. In Act Two, grown to adulthood, she meets a young fox and falls in love -- with the inevitable result. The gossiping forest creatures all tell tales and the act ends with a wedding scene.
In Act Three the poacher sets out a fox trap, which makes the young vixen cubs laugh. But the poacher, seeing the Vixen, shoots and kills her. The Forester sees the Vixen's fur hanging around the neck of the woman he loved at her wedding, and flees back into the forest where he falls asleep. The opera ends when a baby frog jumps into his lap, wakes him, and says that he is the grandson of the frog who woke him at the beginning.
Janáček set this pastoral tale -- almost a fable, really -- at the very height of his musical powers. The techniques he used are familiar from other mature works of his. The orchestral parts in many places are dominated by short little ostinato phrases repeated on and on, while other themes wind around them. Melodic lines have some smooth contours, but also some wide, difficult leaps. The music always is grounded in some kind of tonality, but the use of unexpected chord relationships and modal harmonies derived from folk music gives it an astringency foreign to the work of Smetana and Dvořák. Please note, though, that "astringent" doesn't mean positively painful to the ear!
The first act in particular is chock-full of delightful and memorable melodies, and this is certainly not always the case with Janáček. If you've ever heard a suite of excerpts from the opera played in a concert, it usually will consist of excerpts from Act One! In particular there is a charming, gossamer-light waltz tune for a dance of grasshoppers and crickets, who obviously can't be thumping around to the strains of a full orchestra! The final scene of the act, showing the Vixen's escape, would do duty very nicely for a cartoon or movie chase scene, complete with a squalling soprano line from the Crested Hen!
The gossiping birds in Act Two are beautifully represented by an unaccompanied chorus, eventually joined by orchestra for the concluding wedding. The third act begins with an ominous march-tune for the poacher setting out his traps. And so it goes. The music couldn't possibly be more unlike the work of Wagner, but it does share with Wagner's works the illustrative quality that allows us to see equally the dancing flames around Brunnhilde or (in this case) the flittering dancing of insects.
The title role of the Vixen needs a lyric soprano voice, not without weight, but certainly not a Wagnerian soprano from what Anna Russell once called the "brass bra brigade"!
The opera has been recorded several times and has seen performance more often in recent years. Indeed, there has even been a TV cartoon version created, with singers and players under the direction of Kent Nagano! Every reviewer I've ever read, though, has said that the closest to a definitive recorded version is the classic Decca set conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. It's a striking thought that an Australian should become the first conductor to record all the Janáček operas complete. His complete identification with the music of the composer is one of the two major strengths of this recording.
The other one is the singing of the late, lamented Lucia Popp in the title role. No less than with Daphne by Richard Strauss which I wrote about a few months back, this is a role written in the subconscious hope that some day she would come along to sing it! Her voice is ideally attuned to the composer's sound world, light in tone but sufficient in weight for louder passages, and with a soaring lyrical quality matched to spot-perfect intonation even on sweeping high phrases with big leaps in them. What a peerless performance -- surely the one to which all later performers of the role will and must be compared.
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